Healthcare News and Policy

Learn about different topics in healthcare policy and how current and future healthcare professionals can work in and shape our healthcare system.

What You Should Know: Lies in the Patient-Doctor Relationship

by

What You Should Know is an ongoing series covering a range of informational topics relevant to current and future healthcare professionals.
It happens to every medical student sooner or later – the realization that their patient has lied to them. Especially for students, who are just beginning to gain clinical experience, this realization can come as a shock. A sense of betrayal, anger or even the desire for retribution can set in, all of which can be damaging to the doctor-patient relationship.
These emotions aside, it might help student doctors dealing with the nature of this reality to understand where deception enters into the therapeutic relationship – as well as how and why people lie in a clinical setting and what the doctor can do about it.

Read more

What You Should Know: The Pros and Cons of Medical Marijuana

by

What You Should Know is an ongoing series covering a range of informational topics relevant to current and future healthcare professionals.
The numbers alone make it a significant issue: as of 2015, 23 states and the District of Columbia have legalized the use of medical marijuana – and 9 more states are currently working on legislation to do the same. Two more states – Washington and Colorado – have gone so far as to legalize its recreational use. It is likely, therefore, that medical students today will feel the effects of medical marijuana use when they go into practice for themselves.
Medical – and recreational – marijuana use is a complex issue with medical, political, and social implications. Below are evidence-based arguments for and against this use to give student doctors the opportunity to understand the finer points of this controversy.

Read more

Up in Smoke: The Challenges of Physician Burnout

by

The days are long, the nights short – unless you’re on call or night float, in which case that is reversed. Regardless of where you are in your training, whether in medical school or already out of residency, there will be days when it all just feels like too much. Too much work, too much emotional energy expended, too much illness. Too many petty tasks or meaningless phone calls or purposeless turf wars. Hopefully, those times will be few and far between, buoyed by the days where you make a tricky diagnosis, have an appreciative patient, or just get out of the hospital with daylight left and go for a run. However, for a significant number of physicians, these despondent days stack one atop the next, stretching into weeks where they feel to exhausted to invest energy in their patients, let alone themselves. These individuals are likely suffering from burnout.

Read more

Breaking Bad (News, That Is)

by

My stomach sunk. The results of the biopsy were back and it was not good. I had met Ms. Jones eight days ago when she was admitted for a pneumonia that antibiotics couldn’t seem to shake. Once hospitalized, we’d brought out the big guns and she had been clinically improving on that well-loved duo of vanc and zosyn. (Med students take note: vanc/zosyn is almost always an acceptable answer when pimped about which antibiotics to start – they may be overkill, but you’re unlikely to be wrong.) Despite her improvement, things had not been adding up – we kept putting 2 and 2 together and getting 6. A young woman in her late 30s, she had no good reason to have this month-long pneumonia and her chest x-ray looked, in a word, terrible. Even I as an intern could see that what had been a right middle lobe infection when she first presented a month ago was now also in her upper lobes and – oddly – her left lung was looking increasingly cloudy.

Read more

The National Health Service Corps: Cutting Student Debt and Promoting Primary Care

by

The National Health Service Corps creates a win-win for doctors and underserved communities by financing medical education and bringing health care to those who need it most.

A U.S. Medical Student’s Experience in Germany

by

As a medical student from the U.S., it is always fascinating to experience how medical care is delivered in other countries. As our health care expenditures balloon to unprecedented levels, the topics of medical care and medicine in general have never been more pervasive. From this dialogue, comparisons between the U.S. and international health care systems are naturally made, but few people outside of those who do medical tourism, international rotations, or medical humanitarian work actually experience the differences firsthand. Experiencing medicine in countries with drastically different systems than the U.S. is highly valuable for U.S. medical students, both in clinical practice and in understanding the business and legal aspects of medicine.

Read more

Global Health Research Ethics, Part 1: Gaining Experience

by

Students considering what to do during their summer break in medical school or public health school often face a dilemma in choosing what to do. The commonly held belief is that in order to build your resume, you must undertake a research project. Volunteering for a global health program, either focused on provision of medical care or public health oriented, is perceived as the weaker choice, one that won’’t look as good to your future employers.
There are several underlying reasons for this perception, for example, many employers come from a more traditional perspective and were trained prior to the proliferation of global health opportunities. They and their peers may not have had similar experiences and may not identify with how formative or educational they can be, or be familiar with the types of skills that can be gained through participation. Another reason for trepidation is that the quality of global health opportunities is so widely variable, and many loosely organized and informal programs exist. Nearly anyone can get in to a global health volunteer program of some sort, as long as they are willing to pay, since such programs serve as income generation mechanisms for many nonprofit organizations or may be run by students on an ad hoc basis, with little selectivity.

Read more